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Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Destination: QUANZHOU & XIAMEN (Part 1)

Last February 23 to March 1, my family and I traveled to Quanzhou, China to celebrate my niece's first birthday. How SOSYAL?! :D As many of you know, my achi ( eldest sister ) and her family is based in China. The flight we took was super early as PAL only has one flight per day to Xiamen. Xiamen is 2 hours away from Manila. Quanzhou is 2 hours away from Xiamen by car and 45minutes away by bullet train. Here's my photo diary of our one week relaxing vacation trip.

Day 01

We left Manila around 7:40am.

I find the plane food of Philippine Airlines is becoming less and less in content. There are no appetizer and fruit cups anymore. The meals now only include one main dish and one pastry dessert. I had pork while my sister had fish which had a funny smell to it.

2 hours later we finally landed at Xiamen Gaoqi International Airport. As usual, my achi was late in fetching us.

After lunch, my sister told me there's a new mall which has cool stores such as Sephora in Quanzhou where they live. So we all agreed not to roam around Xiamen anymore and headed to Quanzhou then. Wanda Plaza has 4 floors of branded stores and a lot of fabulous restaurants.

The Hobbit was only being shown in China and there was an event about it.

I got a couple of eye shadows and other good stuff from Sephora. I can't wait to write reviews about them!

I was shocked to see a 2 floor H&M store in a provincial place located in the outskirt of Xiamen City! We don't even have H&M in Manila! Apparently, my achi wanted to surprise me about it so she didn't tell me they already have H&M here.

When I was on a study tour for 6 months in Xiamen about 3 and a half years ago, I used to save up my allowance just to buy something nice from this store, Vero Moda. In case you are wondering if I bought anything from this store during this trip, the answer is no. Their clothes prices increased and that the ones on sale were mostly winter stuff which I cannot use in Manila's scorching heat. Boo!

Since it's only our first day in China, we only shopped a little. When we were younger, my mom taught us to be patient and see things from other stores first then panic buy our top choices on the last day so that we stay within our shopping budgets. My sister took us to this tea store Dessert to get some of her favorite tea drinks before going to our dinner place.

If you can read Chinese, this is the shop's information.

My achi got her Herbed Green Tea drink while Rin-Rin and I both had Fresh Passion Fruit Tea drinks.

We had dinner at Cafe Bellagio. It's the same restaurant as Lugang Cafe found here in Manila but I'm not certain why they didn't use the same restaurant name there.

After dinner, we all had ice cream bars from Haagen Dazs!

We all ordered this Crispy Vanilla with Milk Chocolate Sandwich. It was SOOO GOOD!!!

After dessert my dad and Ahya Adrian wanted to have a cup of coffee before going home.

Feeling so full of everything we just ate, my siblings and I walked around the vicinity. By the way, the weather was only 15 degrees. I was pretty ecstatic to wear all my winter outfits.

3 hours later we headed back to Quanzhou and went to Walmart to get grocery items.

Look at the Godzilla sized cauliflower! It's the same size as a bowling bowl!!!

I got a lot of my favorite jelly cups with fresh mandarin oranges and Lychee gummies here. They're safe to eat by the way.

Walmart offers freshly baked bread and we took home loaves of them to be eaten for breakfast.

We took out Carl's Jr burgers for dinner since my mom just stayed at home that night.

While waiting for our burgers, we walked around the mall and found out it was Lantern Festival tomorrow, thus you can see a lot of Chinese lanterns hanged on the streets and displayed inside the malls.